Juan Parra Cancino Timbre Networks: An approach to Composition and Performance in Computer Music 1 Introduction Perhaps the most talked about contribution of electronic media to music com- position is the dramatic expansion of the musician’s timbre palette. The idea of starting the compositional process from something as protean as the imagination and the production of the sound units that will constitute our basic material is a poetic and fascinating concept present since the early works of K. Stockhausen in the mid-fifties. Equally idealistic and poetic is P. Schaeffer’s premise of capturing, extrapolating and re-organising the ‘natural’ sound universe around us by means of recording and manipulation, in order to generate new semantic discourses. These two early attempts to incorporate and explore the capabilities of elec- tronic tools for creating a ‘new’ music, with a ‘new’ syntax, were also the first to face the aesthetic challenge of how to present these creative results in front of an audience. Although attempts to create new environments and presentation forms for these listening experiences have been made, the traditional conven- tions concerning how and where to present music persist until today, due to – among other reasons – the socio-political implications of modifying every aspect of what music represents as a social event. While the new musical languages/ structures and their relationship to sound have changed dramatically, neither composers nor audiences seem ready to renounce what they embraced as the primary musical communication event by default: the concert situation. The rapid evolution of technology (and its economic democratization) has progressively made it possible to generate in real time, in front of an audience, similar processes to those early electronic efforts, produced in a dedicated studio. But what are the ramifications of this for music creation and interpreta- tion, beyond the shortening of the time span between production and exposi- tion? And how does that affect our overall musical experience, from producers to consumers? We tend to divide musical practice in two: Composition and Performance. How we discover and perceive creativity within these two roles is governed by the ways in which we view the creative process. The creative act of composing has been compared throughout history to a form of alchemy. There is a certain ‘magic’ in Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 16.10.19 14:24 356 Juan Parra Cancino the manipulation and combination of ‘isolated’ elements to generate something ‘new’ and ‘original’. It has also been compared to cooking. But what seems to be unique to Music is the somewhat artificial historical divide between the roles of composer and performer. Although not a necessary feature of artistic practice, Western tradition has conventionally separated the role of the creator and that of the interpreter, assigning the former a mystical, almost religious character (‘the Creator’) and investing the latter with a no-less mystical role: the Medium, who holds the key for manifesting in the real world the composer’s vision. Creativity in interpretation, as difficult as it is to describe, is somehow not hard at all to recognize, and is arguably concerned with whether some perform- ers are able to shine and ‘add that difference’ even to pieces that, on paper, do not necessarily hold anything that seems striking or special. As noted by Veale, Feyaerts & Forceville (this volume), Different performers and performances can reveal different ways of interpreting an original composition. Some performances of a familiar musical creation can still take the audience by surprise, and seduce it into an appreciation of the performer’s own creative vision. In early electronic music, the conceptual creator (i.e. the composer) and the implementer (the interpreter) have been re-combined into one. But this time around the ‘blending’ of roles links the implementer’s skills to more technical tasks (the technician/engineer) and takes away from the Medium the artistic and creative powers of a traditional instrumental interpreter. In early ‘pure’ electronic music pieces, that existed then in fixed media and still do today, the instrument/agent that gives the creators of this music the ability to preserve the manifestation of their ‘magical quests’ as pristinely as possible is not the performer, but the actual media itself (e.g. tape, CD’s). For the final work preserves both the conceptual process as well as the interpretative process con- ducted by the composer in a studio. Both of these processes are arguably ‘impos- sible’ to reproduce in a performance. As the development of notation gave birth to music that was impossible to imagine without the abstraction and distance that musical text gives to the mate- rial (e.g., the instruments), the creative experimental processes behind early electronic music gave birth to musical structures that could only be shaped by the possibilities and limitations of recorded media. But in the same way that highly complex instrumental scores had to be ultimately decoded by a human interpreter, electronic music had to be presented in a place that was not the composer’s studio, a place with different physical dimensions and reproduction equipment and – perhaps this is the most dramatic difference of all – a place that contained an audience! Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 16.10.19 14:24 Timbre Networks: An approach to Composition and Performance in Computer Music 357 Dealing with an audience was not the only case where the world of electronic music had to face and address the traditional elements of music. To discover new tools did not mean that composers forgot the experience and familiarity of the old ones. The combination of both electronic and instrumental sources – and its performers themselves – was to give rise to the coexistence of two very different sound universes. Over the following pages, I will propose and present a method that integrates the sound realm of computer music into the domain of human performance, striv- ing to find a balance between these two worlds by focusing on the importance of timbre in today’s music creation. I shall also explore the historical contribution of the performers of contemporary music to its idiomatic development. 2 Timbre Composition The cultural break produced by World War II pushed artists into a search for new ways and forms of organising their creative material. In music, this pre- cipitated a shift away from the hierarchical importance of pitch and harmony to instead favour other aspects of the sound universe, such as rhythm and timbre, while dealing with a continuous expansion of what could be considered ‘musical material’. This search for new sonorities affected the way composers and performers related to their instruments. The break away from tonality made it possible to give room to previously avoided sounds to become part of the palette of an instru- ment, incorporating and standardising the sounds produced by what we now call ‘extended performance techniques’ (as present in Luciano Berio’s Sequenzas, written between 1958 and 2002, for example). The composer’s search for new ways of relating to his instruments pushed the exploration of orchestral texture even further, as evidenced already in the work of Berlioz and Debussy. This new, expanded palette affected the way that overall musical structure is dealt with, shifting the focus of attention from harmony to timbre and providing an opportunity for some instruments – most strikingly the non-pitched percussion instruments – to claim a much more important role in the creative process. Arnold Schoenberg’s vision of a melody of timbres, wherein the temporal evolution of a piece is not marked by melodic lines or harmonic progressions but by the interconnection and sequence of complex sound structures, evolved into the development of the orchestra as a complex generator of timbres. This new perspective inspired composers to find structural complexities not necessarily Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 16.10.19 14:24 358 Juan Parra Cancino connected with music tradition, and translate them, at least conceptually, into the musical domain. For instance, Iannis Xenakis’ Phitoprakta aims to use the orchestra as a sound generator for mimicking the collisions of gas particles. In his book Formalized Music (1992: 16), we find some insight into the ideas behind the construction of these complex textures: We can control continuous transformations of large sets of granular and/or continuous sounds. In fact, densities, durations, registers, speeds, etc., can all be subjected to the law of large numbers with the necessary approximations. We can then with the aids of means and deviations shape these sets and make them evolve in different directions. The best known is that which goes from order to disorder, or vice versa, and which introduces the concept of entropy. We can conceive other continuous transformations: for example, a set of plucked sounds transforming into a set of bowed sounds, or in electronic music, the passage of one sonic substance to another, assuring thus an organic connection between the two substances. Other composers expanded the orchestral timbre by means of innovative uses of the physical space and the spatial distribution of instruments. A good example of this is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras. In a Lecture tran- scribed by Die Riehe (1961: 67–82), he offered some insight about what he was searching for with this piece: It was necessary to present more or less long groups of sounds, noises and a cross between the two simultaneously in various tempi. So that this could be correctly played and heard, a large orchestra of 109 players was split up into three smaller orchestras: each of these was to have its own conductor and had to be placed at some distance of the other two.